Showing Archived Posts

A Dutch research team says transplanting human feces from a healthy person to a sick person can cure a common and severe intestinal infection that antibiotics cannot control. The human gut is filled with billions of useful and protective bacteria. But those bacteria can be wiped out when people with infections are treated with a […]

A four-year international study has found the soot produced by diesel engines and wood-burning stoves is the second-greatest human contributor to climate change. That assessment of its effect, by a multinational team of 31 experts, is nearly twice what the United Nations estimated five years ago. Known as black carbon, soot now ranks ahead of […]

Scientists already know chimpanzees are the closest human relatives. They now say chimps and humans share a trait that was thought to be exclusive to people — a sense of fairness. U.S. researchers at Emory University had chimps play a game called “Ultimatum,” where one chimp can choose between two tokens. One token would let […]

Two-hundred 44 million years ago, an 8.6 meter-long monster ruled the ocean that covered what is today America’s western desert. In a study supported by the National Geographic Society, an international team of scientists describes the giant predator, whose fossilized remains were found on a remote Nevada mountain range in 2010. Named Thalattoarchon saurophagis – […]

There is nothing like a regular sleep schedule to keep you healthy, especially on a long voyage to Mars. On June 3, 2010, a six-man team of international volunteers was sealed into a 550-cubic-meter spacecraft-like compartment at a Russian Academy of Sciences facility to simulate a 520-day round-trip mission to the Red Planet. During the […]

A piece of Mars that fell to Earth and was found in the Sahara desert in 2011 has revealed surprising new details about the Red Planet. Researchers from the University of New Mexico say the Martian rock represents a new class of meteorite they believe came from Mars’s crust. The scientists have determined that the […]

The U.S. space agency, NASA, says pieces of an asteroid that have been orbiting the Sun for hundreds of years could delight skywatchers this week. The Quadrantid meteors will blaze trails across the sky when they enter Earth’s atmosphere at about 145,000 kilometers per hour and burn up 80 kilometers above the planet’s surface. It […]

Drought, urban decline and government collapse ended Syria’s central economic role in the Middle East… 4200 years ago. Research from the University of Sheffield in England points to striking parallels between today’s war-torn Syria and political upheavals in the Bronze-Age Mesopotamian empire known as Akkadia. Ellery Frahm, of the university’s Department of Archeology, found the […]

A new study finds that ozone pollution — one of the main components of urban smog — can do more than cause respiratory illness and increase hospitalizations. It can also lower farmworker productivity. Columbia University researchers compared data about the productivity of agricultural field workers in California with information about environmental air-quality conditions. They found […]

The international Cassini space probe, which has been orbiting Saturn and its moons since 2004, has sent detailed new images of a remarkable, Nile-like river valley on Saturn’s moon Titan. The river stretches more than 400 kilometers from its headwaters’ and flows into a large sea. It is the first time astronomers have seen a […]